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ABSTRACT
This article argues that the invention of the European Union (EU) common market and the lifting of national border controls produced a mobility-control vacuum within the EU and its member states. Building on ethnographic research in the German city of Munich and symptomatic policy-paper analysis (2013–2021), it traces the emergence of a new policy field that targets ‘poverty migration’ and ‘benefit fraud’ in this vacuum. This internal border work builds on transformations of the German social system from an ethos of welfare to active labour-market policy. With the classical toolbox of national migration regimes no longer working for intra-EU movers, their mobility rights and right to residence have been increasingly restricted by making economic self-reliance a conditionality of stay and excluding those not engaged in wage labour or self-employment from welfare services. Social policy is used as a tool for controlling mobility, which we refer to as ‘workfare-state borders.' This is because it reinforces the radicalization of the workfare state by either pushing the racialized and migrantized poor into precarious wage labor or depriving them of social protection. This internal border work reconnects meritocratic logics with classical articulations of racism, thus contributing to the finely tuned reinvention of a racial order in Europe.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Dublin Regulation established a range of criteria that define which country is responsible for processing the asylum claim; by doing so, it attempts to prevent intra-EU mobility practices by asylum seeking migrants which have been labelled ‘asylum shopping’. However, empirical research shows that the Dublin Regulation has never worked in this regard, with asylum-seeking migrants still highly mobile within EU territory on the basis of networks, communities and employment, and other life chances. This co-produced a situation that would come to be defined as a severe ‘crisis’ of the Dublin Regulation (Hess and Kasparek Citation2017).
2 The EU, in fact, set up diverse programmes (e.g. the Erasmus scheme) to enhance this intra-EU mobility.
3 We, hereby, also seek to contribute to the established research landscape on local implementations of the European regime of social security rights, with it currently still rather disconnected from critical migration, border and race studies (Dwyer et al. Citation2019; Heidenreich and Rice Citation2016; Ratzmann Citation2020; Scheibelhofer and Holzinger Citation2018).
4 The scope of this article does not allow us to address the multiple histories of racialisation in Germany and Europe – from colonialism, projects of ‘expansion’ towards Eastern Europe, differential inclusion of racialised minorities, to the Shoah (although the history of anti-Semitism differs from that of racism) and Poyramos.
5 A recent court decision shows that the constitutional right to a minimum level of existence still has powerful proponents. After a long legal battle, penalties amounting to more than 30 percent of monthly payments were finally deemed illegal by the Federal Social Court in 2020. The judges upheld the principle of the universal social state – and, thus, inflicted a powerful defeat on the advancement of the workfare state, at least in relation to those who are entitled to ALG II. In 2022, a new welfare reform replaced Hartz IV with ‘Bürgergeld’. Although there were a few changes, all the main features of the old system that are explained in this article still apply to ‘Bürgergeld’.
6 Section 7, Paragraph 1, Sentence 2, No. 2, SGB II.
7 Two other status groups enjoy residency rights on the basis of seeking employment: students without EU citizenship up to one year after finishing their studies and third-country nationals holding asylum status in another EU member state.
8 Name changed for anonymity.
9 All translations of interview material and policy papers from German to English language have been done by the authors themselves.
10 This encounter, thus, also confirms research which shows that processes of policy-making are not structured top-down, but that local street-level bureaucrats and local politicians have discretionary power. They shape their strategies with relative autonomy (Eule Citation2018). They can either ignore new requirements, adopt them particularly quickly, or redesign them – be it out of a decided resistance to the higher-level regulations, out of ignorance or by mistake (Lipsky Citation2010). For a study on the treatment of EU citizens in German Jobcenters, see Ratzmann (Citation2020).
11 In German: ‘Armutszuwanderung aus Südosteuropa’.
12 Case C-333/13 Dano v. Jobcenter Leipzig [2014] ECLI-2358.
13 Case C-67/14 Jobcenter Berlin Neuköln v. Nazifa, Sonita, Valentina, and Valentino Alimanovic [2015] ECLI-597.
14 Opinion of Advocate General Melchior Wathelet delivered on 20 May 2014, Case C-333/13.
15 The network Europe in Movement has gathered and published information about the regulation on their website: europainbewegung.de.